Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Personal

Postal Service

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In grade school I found the concept of Pen Pals stultifying; try to find one kid to strike up a slow-motion exchange with via handwritten letter? Handwritten letters took too long to write, were too hard to read. Why not just trade phone calls? Or, at least, typed letters.

It was third grade, and my teacher absolutely refused to allow me to type my letters. I had a typewriter at home, my little blue manual on that folded into its own suitcase, on which I would peck away grade school murder mysteries and horror stories. Having recently received a note from my incredibly square Wisconsin friend, I anticipated a dreaded letter writing exercise in class the next day. In a pro-active academic turn (still rare, to this day) I got out my steely blue friend, and pecked away.

The next day in class, when the teacher told us that we would be writing out our replies, I raised my hand. I had brought mine, I pointed out, and it was already neatly typed.

My teacher was not amused. I couldn’t get out of the exercise just because I could type. I would still have to write out my letter.

Defiant, I struck back; I would love to write my letter in the horrible, awkward, cursive of third grade, but surely I would be allowed to place my wonderfully neat typewritten note into the massive envelope that would shuttle letters to our sister-school of hopelessly sheltered born agains in WI?

She was aghast. A typed note? No no no.

At this point the details become a bit muddled; to the best of my recollection, I may have refused to write out my letter so that she would be forced to use my typewritten one. She may have taken the typewritten one from me and insisted I write one from scratch. All I recall is that I was flustered, and made to turn my desk to the wall and write my note by hand, possibly in duplicate.

I can’t remember if my mother found out, but I suspect if she did she probably just had a hearty laugh. For all of my critique of her, one principal she has stood by is that no child should be restricted by a lowest common denominator (she knows the phrase, but god help you if you ask her to show you what it means with fractions), in the same way refused to let teachers force me to show my work on repetitive addition tables in first grade when I had already figured out how to multiply.

I hate when I figure out how to do things the fast way but am restricted by a classroom (or a world) of slow movers.

I’m No Al Gore, but…

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I have an obsession with connectivity.

If I have five free minutes at work, waiting for a phone call or finishing lunch, I immediately connect to my favorite people and topics on the internet.

I always say I had been waiting for this my whole life, and people think I’m trying to say that I am Al Gore and that I invented the internet. I’m usually at a loss to describe what I mean, but I have finally thought of a good example.

When I was five or six, He-Man toys were all the rage. However, being the equal opportunity battle coordinator I was, I also wanted to have She-Ra toys to fill out the gender ratio. I had nearly every He-Man toy, and I know for a fact that I had every single She-Ra. Except for one.

Spinnerella. She was one of the last of the series to be released, with the result being She-Ra didn’t take up all that much shelf-space in the action figures department anymore. My mother and I were intent on finding her – we had just found her net-tossing friend and, my personal favorite, Entraptra and Perfuma. Just one more She-Ra to make my fantasy world complete.

To this day I’ve never seen that damn toy in person. We went to every toy store in the Greater Philadelphia area to look. Were we supposed to cross state lines? Call stores around the country? In 1986, how were we to coordinate our search?

In my tiny, five-year-old mind, I remember thinking how silly it was that I couldn’t find that one toy. It obviously existed. Knowing what I know now about action figures, I’d wager to say that my spinning friend may have been short-shipped, or may have appeared with lower frequency in each case. However, at the time, I just knew they were out there somewhere, and couldn’t get over the mystery of why they had to be so damned hard to find. Surely there was a store that had too many of her that they couldn’t sell? Surely some girl had gotten two for her birthday, and had an extra?

I may not be Al Gore, but even then I knew there should… there had to be a way to connect to a larger group of people with the same interest. Some kind of a collective intelligence.

The internet came as no surprise.

Numbers

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If Kerry loses OH(20), FL(27), and CO (10), and if he wins all his projected easy states (CA, CT, DC, DE, IL, MA, MD, ME, MN, NH, NJ, NY, OR, PA, RI, VT, WA) plus WI, MI, HI, NM, NV, and IA, it’s tied.

Kerry can lose FL(27), CO(9), NM(5), and NV(5) if he wins all his easy states (above) plus WI, MI, OH and one or both of IA or HI. Kerry Total 271-279.

If you’re not an insane spreadsheet-wielding maniac like me, here an EV tally for you to play with.

Given those assessments, you might be interested in tracking OH numbers on their state page.

Though a FL loss is definitely in the cards tonight, the state has an obscene amount of absentee ballots to be counted, so unless someone wins clearly without FL it’s not actually over until they’re counted.

CNN article here. Just in the heavily Democratic Broward and Miami-Dade there are a combined total of approximately 186,000 ballots. Kerry currently holds a roughly 19.5% lead in those counties combined, which would translate to less than a 4,000 net gain from the absentee ballots. He needs over 300k to overtake bush.

Fighting Fair

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Election Resources:

Real-Time NYT Results Map (excellent format, with the ever-sexy “Map by Electoral Vote”)

CNN Results Map (allows you to drill down to the county level – awesome).

AP/C-Span Map

My Due Diligence dot Com (blog-style reporting on Congressional Races)

Vote/Election fraud, vote suppression, voting irregularities, voter intimidation

Election Law Blog

Electoral Vote (backups!!!!!!!)

1:05PM – Ariel, who is working downtown as a poll inspector, reports that Center City Philadelphia polls had more voters by noon than they did in the last Mayoral election.

6:30PM – GOP tries to delay count of Philly absentee ballots. Read the complaint – it’s completely valid. Delaying the Philly absentees won’t have too large of an effect on local elections, but it will have a noticeable impact on the overall state total. This is why i refuse to vote absentee.

6:50PM – PA Results (who knows how timely they’ll be)

Watch out for pages that will announce a predicted winner based on exit polls – as we saw in the case of networks calling Florida early in 2000, nothing counts except the final vote total.


8:05PM – What to Watch For on Election Night (nothing new to me, but a solid read)

9:50PM – Everyone calls NY for Kerry with only 9% reporting. No one calls PA for Kerry with 20%. To be fair, Philly is reporting fairly early, which will skew the state result right up until the last second, but i really don’t think PA is gonna be as close as it’s supposed to be.